Everyone Who Leaked the Twist Ending of 'Last Christmas' Still Annoys Paul Feig

When Universal released the first trailer for Paul Feig’s rom-com “Last Christmas” in August, internet sleuths quickly read between the lines and deduced, much to the filmmakers’ dismay, that Henry Golding’s holiday knight-in-shining armour to Emilia Clarke’s disillusioned Christmas-store elf is actually a ghost.

Everyone Who Leaked the Twist Ending of ‘Last Christmas’ Still Annoys Paul Feig

One of the most popular YouTube comments on Universal’s teaser explains why: Tom (Golding) wears the same costume throughout the film, whereas Kate (Clarke) wears a variety of outfits. In the trailer, he’s also the only one who interacts with Kate. It’s a commendable piece of detective work, but it’s not entirely correct. Tom is indeed dead in the film, and Kate is the only one who can see him. The biggest spoiler, as pointed out by the same commenter, comes from the George Michael song that precedes the teaser and is based on the film: “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart” — as an organ donor, Tom physically gave Kate his heart. Feig stated his dissatisfaction with Universal’s marketing team’s choices for the trailer and the media’s reporting on the pre-release speculation in a recent interview with Collider. “It didn’t bother me that people were attempting to figure it out.” What irritated me the most was that the media picked up on it and then published these theories, some of which were true, but they were printed as spoilers, and I’d never seen anything like it happen to another movie before, where people, even if they didn’t know it, were actively trying to spoil something, you know what I mean?” Feig explained.

“It’s not like when ‘Knives Out’ was released, everyone was like, ‘I guess so and so was the murderer.'” To be absolutely honest, I didn’t understand why that was happening to a romantic comedy (laughs), so I found it really frustrating.” Feig believes that by showing Kate’s condition in the teaser, people were able to connect the dots. He stated that if he had his way, he would not have revealed that narrative aspect. He does not, however, place blame on the marketing department. Audiences were more responsive to the advertisement when they knew Kate was sick, according to trailer testing; Feig highlighted the benefits of test screenings in depth in the interview. “There have been movies when I was like, ‘Don’t give it away.'” I sometimes won’t let things into the trailer that I think will entice people to see the movie, and as a result, I’ve got this movie with everything protected on it, but not enough people are going to view it. As a commercial director, you have to make that strange trade-off,” he explained. “However, it’s aggravating.

When you see how they want to promote anything, your heart drops a little, but I’ve been very fortunate because Universal is amazing, and Lionsgate was great when I worked with them, and Fox was great. I’ve had a number of successful campaigns. It’s almost as simple as making a movie. Marketing is the most difficult thing in the world to get properly because you have to walk a razor-thin line.” The twist was one of the aspects of the film that divided reviews; it had a Metacritic score of 50. One of the things that drew Feig to the Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings-penned script was that.